Thoughts & Opinions

Google Books is one of the easiest and best online marketing vehicles.

Paul Manning, Vice President, Book Sales for Springer

A 1999 Blackwell’s title, Metaphysics: An Anthology, has had 2,583 page views and
597 “buy this book” click-throughs since it became part of the program. Without any
other marketing, the title has had “its best year in the U.S. since publication…”
The high rate of “buy this book” clicks is translating into sales for our deep
backlist.

Edward Crutchley, Book Sales Director, Blackwell Publishing

Google Books is a key to our overall Internet strategy of reaching new markets with
our books in an effective and efficient way. We have seen overall traffic to our
site increase, backlist sales rise, and we’ve acquired nearly 4,000 new direct book
customers for free since the program launched.

Evan Schnittman, VP, Rights & Bus Dev, Oxford University Press

Books featured in the Partner Program show a 15.3% (customer) “conversion rate,”
which means that web surfers who clicked on a Simon and Schuster book in Google
Books either bought a book or went to the Simon and Schuster web site and, for
example, subscribed to a newsletter. Conversion rates for other search engines
languish around 1-3%.

You are providing an invaluable service to history researchers like me, for which I
wish to express my gratitude. My literary research pertains to poverty in Naples,
Italy during the 18th and 19th Centuriesand its medical consequences. I look
forward to more items, and would like you to consider your digitizing William J. A.
Stamer's "Dolce Napoli", 1878. Again, thank you

David C. Schechter, MD, FACS

Other comments: Vocabulary and Handbook of the Chinese Language by Doolitle vol. 1.
Pages 9-10 missing. Also -> I have obtained a 1915 copy of the Tsi Yuen Chinese
language encyclopedia - Chinese - English. It is in 4 volumes of about 250 pages
each. Would Google be interested in scanning this to make it available to everyone?
I live in Sarasota, Florida. I am still searching for downloadable copies of
"Golden Mirror of Medicine" (chinese medical encyclopedia of many volumes, English
translation in 1880's, and the Kanghi Chinese dictionary - another Chinese
Dictionary which I have been unable to find anywhere. I spend many hours of
research in google and you have provided a resource of enormous value to everyone.
Keep up the good work and keep scannning books. It would have been IMPOSSIBLE for
me to find all the books in libraries that I have been able to view, for the first
time, thanks to your search engine.

Jim

My words can not do justice to the value Google is bringing to our nation by
providing the Google Books. You not only are helping us find important passages,
your are helping to preserve them. Many of the works I have studied through your
service are over one hundred years old. I have found that it is almost impossible
to handle books this old without causing some damage. With your help I have ben
able to leave most of these delicate volumes on the shelves. Finally, please know
that the book I am personally writing on liberty in America would have been far
more difficult, if not impossible, without your text searching.

David Wheeler

Book Search is a godsend for genealogists, since we love nothing better than to
spend hours paging through original source documents, looking for snippets of lore
about our ancestors. Now we can read wills, church records, land transactions,
court cases, travellers' diaries and more, in the comfort of our own homes instead
of in dusty library stacks. Now if you would just put up the Documents Relating to
the Colonial History of New York, and more county histories, and Quaker records,
and ..... We always want more. Can you find a way to start on unpublished records
buried in county courthouses? Now that would be a miracle indeed.

Sue Long

I just wanted to drop a note to the Google Book Project, and I'll drop another to
the publisher, that 3 different people purchased the book "The Authentic Tudor
& Stuart Dolls' House" because I found it on Google books while searching for a
quote from another book about 'garderobes'! I was fascinated by the text and images
here, and immediately a) ordered a copy for myself and b) mentioned it on my blog--
and at least 2 of my readers looked at the book online, and went on to order it
right away. Google Books is working for me.

Jenne

When The Gulf War Chronicles first appeared in Google Books, its sales
ranking on the Barnes & Noble index jumped by 85 percent and stayed there.

Google Books has opened the possibility of making every book in every language
available to every person who has access to a computer. A fantastic prospect...

Marvin Kalb, author of "The Last Ambassador" and "The Nixon Memo: Political
Respectability, Russia, and the Press" among others, in
his acceptance speech for the Fourth Estate Award.

What the author's goal must be, above all, is awareness of his work. Without
awareness his book is merely a castoff artifact, forever exiled, beyond the reach
of the reader, his authorial voice condemned to silence and all potential earning
power gone.

As a writer, my biggest worry is that no one ever happens upon my books unless they
go to a bookstore – used to be that writers could rely on grocery stores and
drugstores and so on, but no more. The only readers who discover books are those
that seek them out. We've been robbed of our serendipity. Thank you, thank you,
thank you Google, for providing a way to put books back into the daily round of
average people. When books are visible in search-results, they get an equal footing
with web pages and other new media. If we have hope as authors in the digital age,
it's in projects like Google Books.

As a longtime dues-paying member of the Authors Guild, I'm party to a lawsuit
against Google over its new book-search service called Google Books. As an author
of two books, though, I'm not sure I want to be suing Google. Every writer wants
his or her work to be read. But to be read, a work needs to be found. Digital
search is fast becoming the de facto way to be found...Google Books aims to do for
books what Google has done for the Web...Without some digital equivalent to the
concept of a library, a lot of great writing could be lost to the ages. And no one
– readers, authors, publishers, Google and its competitors – would benefit from
that.

Speaking as the author of a long-forgotten, but still copyrighted, book that would
likely be included in the Google [Book Search] project, I cannot imagine a reason
why my publisher would turn down this form of free advertising...[Google's] project
has the potential to revolutionise the way that we search for information online.
Google may make money doing that but authors and publishers will almost certainly
make money too. That sounds like the classic win-win bargain that underlies
American capitalism and American innovation.

Lack of exposure is the primary reason that a book like mine would fail in the
marketplace. I spend most of my day trying to get attention for my book. Not for
the money, but because I believe that it is well written and funny. Very few
authors will become rich writing books. We do it because we have something to
say...No one has been able to explain to me how I would suffer from people being
able to search for phrases and read excerpts of my book online…Someone asked me
recently, 'Meghann, how can you say you don't mind people reading parts of your
book for free? What if someone xeroxed your book and was handing it out for free on
street corners?' I replied, 'Well, it seems to be working for Jesus.'

Google has succeeded because, on the whole, it has developed excellent products;
it’s folly to judge the company’s behavior on moral grounds. Its shareholders
certainly don’t. Nor can publishers and authors, who are struggling for a way to
survive in a new age, portray their conflict with the company as one between good
and evil. The dual status of several leading publishers as both partner and
adversary to Google underscores their desperate need to hedge their bets in a
digital world that they have yet to master.

Mountain View-based Google started digitizing books three years ago with the help
of five partners, most of them universities. Scholars and students say the
monumental project is starting to pay off for them.

The rush to digitize the written record is one of a number of critical moments in
the long saga of our drive to accumulate, store, and retrieve information
efficiently. It will result not in the infotopia that the prophets conjure up but
in one in a long series of new information ecologies, all of them challenging, in
which readers, writers, and producers of text have learned to survive.